ESTOY COMO NUNCA

May be this makes me sound like a New Age blogger evangelist, this is actually a bit how I feel, but no, it's actually the title of the latest CD from Eliades Ochos (described on the flyleaf as the Catedratico del Son Cubano). I don't know whether this is true or not, but for me he's certainly the member of the Buena Vista social club set who's evolving most musically, unlike the unfortunate Compay Segundo who seems to be going round and round in circles (a 'tour' is after all in Spanish a Giro). This album is truly lovely. Unfortunately it hasn't arrived yet on Amazon's virtual shelves (you see, living in Spain does have SOME advantages), but you can find some of his stuffhere if you don't know his work yet.

This little plug also leads to a couple of more serious points. Firstly, since the Cambridge coffee pot, and poor old Jenny, there's been a lot of emphasis on the uses of web cams, but surprisingly little on the uses of sound packages. I suppose one of the problems is copyright: I mean I could after all cut an MP3 and hang it as a link in some server, but what I'd really like is some way of attaching sound to the file so that it starts playing as the page is opened. That way you could be reading this listening to what I'm listening to, and that would be a whole new internet experience, and for sure, for sure, it's be a whole lot better than seeing what I actually look like.

Then there is all this stuff about 'musical piracy' and record sales. I recently read a piece in the NYT about a Jupiter survey. They found that high users of P2P file sharing tend to buy MORE CD's than other people in the same socio-economic categories. This doesn't surprise me since this is my case: I freely admit to being a heavy duty user of P2P, but I spend more now than ever before on music. Why, because my appreciation of music has expanded beyond the bounds of all comprehension. This is also not surprising since music is also information, and it seems to be one of the basic laws of information that the more you get, the more you need.